I’m a ‘gardener’ by hobby and I consider myself as an amateur and a novice. So, I’m still learning! It all started 3 years ago when I moved to my current home, which has a small garden lot of the size ~348 sqft .
I was never really into gardening before this even though my parents’ garden lot is so much bigger (we used to have rambutan, ciku and mango trees). And my mother has all types of flowers in her garden like the beautiful rose moss (the only flower close to roses that can grow well in this hot humid tropical country), hydrangea, bougainvillea, ixora, varieties of orchids and a lot more. I remember that I always pulled a long face whenever my mother asked me to help her in the garden. (Lucky that my daughter isn’t like me – the little fairy herself loves to help me in the garden .) I even used to shiver with the thoughts of having dirt on my hands and worms! Yikes!Well, that all changed when I started to be so into decorating my new home. Err.. another contributing reason that I’m embarrass to share is my jealousy of my next door neighbour who back then just got back from Cameron HighIands and had all sorts of colourful flowers arranged on the wall that we shared. Unfortunately, they all died soon afterwards.
I love to play with colours and I then started with 2 pots of green, red and yellow codiaeum variegatum or known as pokok puding in Malay, 1 pot of
gardenia or known as bunga piring kaca, 1 pot of purple bougainvillea or known as bunga kertas (flower paper by direct translation) and 1 pot of cananga odorata or known as bunga kenanga. I placed them all on the patio under the shade.Note: ‘Bunga’ in Malay means flower while ‘pokok’ means tree.
From there I started to experiment with propagating, fertilizing, planning and designing landscape and painting my garden with colours. I still have the luscious bougainvillea and gardenia. My pokok puding has a different fate with one infested by snails and the other was over fertilised and died. Same fate for cananga odorata which I planted on the empty land on the side of my property which received too much sun and it died due to insufficient water. Poor little beloved fairies!
Now what makes me want to write a blog about this hobby of mine? Like others, I simply need to be in the spotlight…hahahah! And of course, I want to share and learn from the readers too about how we can care for our flowers. In this hot tropical country, it’s not that easy to have a tree full of flowers, instead, we usually have a tree full of leaves!
